Sleeping in Moonlight

Included in the anthology Midnight Ink from Livina Press.

And now, with the darkness, the ghosts arrive. 

My mother, dead these many years,
a shadow fluttering in the moonlight:
on these endless nights it is her voice
I hear. I try not to listen. I wander instead
as disconnected as the ghosts themselves
through empty echoing rooms in my mind.

So many voices whispering, murmuring,
and I have to wonder if they haunt others’
dreams as they haunt mine, if I am alone
in doubting, sometimes, my very substance.
Whether it is a sign of madness or sanity:

Do strange questions come to you
in the night? Did you once feel affinity
with the denizens of the dark, wondering
if perhaps you might be a ghost, have
always been a ghost, the phantom of
something unfinished, living unaware
that you are now part of the spectral class?
And what happens

next? Who owns you when you no longer belong
to the spaces you haunt? To whom do you owe
your allegiance?

Where I am from, they tell a story: if moonlight
falls over you when you sleep, you will be forever
a moon-child, one of the mystics who only discover
their magic if the moon chooses. Do not sleep
covered in moonlight, they say: changelings
have come into the world this way.